In the prior art, there exist various data centre building structures for housing a multiplicity of racks, each of which comprising storage space for electronic equipment.
Conventional data centres most typically are buildings which comprise a false floor for a computer infrastructure, which is typically housed in 19″ rack enclosures. The cooling is accomplished by cold air, which is pumped into the false floors having holes at appropriate locations in front of the racks. In this way cold air is supplied at the air intakes of the computer racks.
A typical conventional data centre building according to the state of the art is shown in FIG. 1 of WO 2010/000440. This conventional design is somehow disadvantageous, because the single racks have to be designed as closed racks and the air flow through respective racks has to be surveyed and controlled in order to avoid pumping of unnecessary amounts of cold air from the cold aisle.
There exist various concepts, providing a regulation of the air flow into the cold aisle, such that the fans providing the air flow operate at the lowest possible power. The hot air generated by the equipment inside the rack is fed back to heat exchangers being located somewhere else in the data centre building. The heated air is either cooled down again or fresh air is used in order to provide a stream of cold air.
Beside the typical conventional data centre building according to the state of the art WO 2010/000440 discloses a new energy efficient architecture for multi-story computer data centres using liquid cooling media for dissipation of heat being generated by the IT equipment. The so called Green-IT concept realized by WO 2010/000440 allows the reduction of energy consumption for cooling purposes. Conventional data centres often require 50% or more of their energy consumption of the electronic components for cooling purposes. The novel cooling concept of WO 2010/000440 enables data centres which require less than 10% (PUE<1.1; where “PUE” stands for “Power Usage Effectiveness” and is calculated by PUE=total facility power/IT equipment power) of its energy for cooling.
The stationary multi-story computer data centre of WO 2010/000440 becomes a kind of benchmark for later Green-IT concepts to follow, as a constant development towards energy efficient data centres exists. However, stationary computer data centres require a constant demand for such centres and therefore are considered as long-time investments. Quite often, however, there exists only a temporary demand for computer power, or a demand for computer power increases unexpectedly within a short time span. Therefore, there exists a strong need towards mobile data centre containers, which can easily be installed in the near neighbourhood and contain their own infrastructure so that they can be “plugged-in” where stationary computer data centres are undersized and/or only a temporary need for computing power exists.